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Back in the dawn of prehistory, only universities, government agencies, and a few big corporations could get on the Internet. The rest of us either had computers connected to nothing (except maybe an electric outlet), Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL or another service or possibly to an online bulletin board service (BBS). And then, one day in 1989, Barry Shein hooked a server and some modems to an Internet node he managed for a corporate/academic wholesale Internet provider -- and started selling dialup accounts for $20 per month to individuals, small companies, and just about anyone else who came along. Barry called his ISP The World, which is still out there with a retro home page ("Page last modified April 27, 2006"), still selling shell accounts. We may run a second interview with Barry next week, so please stay tuned. (Alternate Video Link)

Robin Miller:
Once upon a time there were no ISPs; if you wanted to be on the
internet, you needed to be a government agency or a university or
something along those lines. And then along came Barry, yes I know it
sounds like a bad country western song, along came John, but here he
is, and he came up with the first commercial ISP, so please, how sir
did this happen?

Barry: Well,
in 1989, in the summer, late summer, I got the idea to start offering
email and similar accounts to people on a server we had, but we
weren’t on the internet, we were on something called UUCP,
which just used dial-up, just used modem-to-modem between servers and
then one day the CEO of UUNET, who was a good friend of mine, called
and he said, would you be willing to host me? Now they were selling
wholesale high-speed internet connections to corporations. He said
would you be willing to host a rack of equipments in your offices so
I could service my customers in Boston. He was down near Washington
DC, this company and growing. And I said, of course. And, he said,
what do you want in return? And I said, all the bits I can eat. And
he said what does that mean? And I said, you know, I want to put
these customers I have directly on the internet. He said, sure, no
problem, you got a T1, which back then was pretty hot actually, like
half megabits, I know it sounds not much today but it was pretty
good.

So we did and so we
continued offering accounts and of course we added that, now on the
internet, you can do internety things, whatever that meant in 1989;
there was no web yet, there was no browsers, but you know, people
exchanged email, we had a shell server, they could use various email
programs, FTPs, they could Telnet. We had quite a few consultants for
example who simply needed to be able to make a local call in Boston
hook up to us and Telnet saying through a machine in California.
There was no SSA chip. So that was a boon to them. They found us
quickly. So that was it and so for the first time we were putting the
general public on the internet for around $20 a month. I'd already
put several companies on the internet and I had been involved with
the internet quite a few years. I put Boston University on the
internet.

I was at Boston
University, worked in the computing center. I was a graduate student.
So I was pretty well known already, which helped, by the powers that
be. You know the internet governors as it were in 1989.... It was a
small club, the internet. We knew each other. We knew each other by
name. So people were like, what are you doing? I said, I am letting
people dial in through the internet and they are like, you can’t
do that and I said, I am charging them money and they were like, I
think that’s illegal. I think what you’re doing is
illegal. You know, I would get these angry mails telling me I
couldn’t do this. They weren’t quite sure why and then
NSF that kind of sort of indicated that, that’s kind of
interesting. We know you. Could you do this? Why don’t we call
this an experiment? An NSF experiment? Then everybody would be okay
with it legally. And I said sure, call it whatever you like, you
know, but I got customers, you know I’m having a 1,000
customers, whatever, dialing into the internet already while we were
talking about this. Then I didn’t hear much else from them. I
mean that sort of calmed things down when NSF, National Science
Foundation spoke. They were running most of the academic or the
entire academic and research network, all those, like BARnet and you
know, all of the kind of, like SURFnet, and they were in charge.
Steve Wolf was in charge other than MILNET for European networks
which of course were charging themselves. There were not many of
them. They were their own entity and they interconnected with the
American Networks.

Robin Miller: You
know interestingly, wait a minute, so you are saying you started out
with a 1,000 paying customers, just got them on to the internet?

Barry: Yes,
on that order, few hundred, I don’t know what it was, I am
saying that by the time we were negotiating, whether this was even
legal I already had about 1000 customers probably.

Robin Miller: And
that’s quite a considerable number, considering what the
Internet wasn’t back then.

Barry: Yeah.
Well, we are out of time and we were trying to make money. I didn’t
have much capital, but I would literally print up flyers, 8.5x11
cheap paper flyers, go over to universities and hand them out. That
was in college or Boston University, again I was just standing in
front and hand it to anybody walking by like it was a political
thing. Something we mined quite actively was when we later made a
nice brochure, a little trifled brochure because we realized that
when people were laid off, it had gotten pretty bad. When people were
laid off at companies like DEC where they had internet access, they
had no other way to get internet access. Of course, as they were laid
off, their access was shut down. You never give away open employee
access to your network.

Robin Miller: No.

Barry: So, we
then went to HR of these companies that were doing lay-offs. We sent
brochures saying, well here is something you can hand to a customer
on the exit and we’re happy to accommodate them. And of course
people who have used the Internet, used the internet to find new
jobs. So it was worth something for them. We had customer all over
the world, remember in total about January and so for months, till
almost spring, I had a monopoly on the internet, on the public
internet.

Robin Miller:
Doug Humphrey

Barry: It was
nowhere else. I’d get customers from what?

Robin Miller:
Doug Humphrey, right behind you, down in Maryland. You remember
him?

Barry: Who?

Robin Miller:
Doug Humphrey.

Barry: Yeah,
I speak with him all the time.

Robin Miller: He
wasn’t that far behind you, I know because my friend Danny
Setzer called me, he ran a cab company in Baltimore. I worked there
some and he was saying, we can get internet accounts now, we can get
internet accounts, you call this guy Doug and you give him $19 a
month and you have the internet. You have a shell account and you
have email to everybody and you can even see the website. And I said,
what’s a website and he was talking about the Stanford Linear
Accelerator project website and Paul who ran that and who I have
since met, and who has since moved to St. Petersburg, Florida after
he retired. But yeah, I jumped on it, if I had gotten one of your
flyers, I would have been, yes, sign me up. So it worked.

Barry: Yeah.
It was exciting and of course, as you know, very few people knew what
it was. So it was kind of a hard sell. I mean you got your first
several hundred or thousand, and then it really slowed down, and we
told people, well we told people that hadn’t already been on
the internet. Their reaction usually was, well what would I do with
it? _____10:24 or AOL, which were not on the Internet but you know
they had fancy interfaces and all. Yeah, they already had an internal
structure with discussion groups and that sort of thing. And I said,
I don’t know, this is more a free for all, you know we don’t
control it, we just give you access to it. And they were like well,
may be, okay. You really got that like, they hadn’t heard of
the internet and they thought it was like something new. Iit would be
like selling ham radio licenses.

I was first on the
internet at around 1977, maybe 1978. I had almost continuous internet
access through that whole early era. To me it was... I almost always
found a way to set up a modem at home, set up a terminal and a modem.
Back in the old day, I had dumb terminals at home. Now we got a Z19
or I had a Beehive terminal, something somebody sold me used, it was
a big clump, I think I still have it in the next room. It had so
little memory that you had to account for highlighted characters
because you could have 80 characters on a line but if someone
highlighted, that’s twice as much – you could only have
40 highlighted characters. I mean, this was an era of bit counting.

(Remember, unless you Provide a Service that routes packets onto the Internet, you're not an ISP. You may be a UUCP service provider, you may be a BITNET service provider, you may be a BBS service provider, and that all may be very important, but you're not an Internet service provider, as per the "ISP" in the title of this article, unless you let your customers send IP datagrams onto the Internet; relaying mail onto the Internet, while an extremely usefu

Think again. AOL, prodigy, compuserve were all proprietary, isolated systems. They did not provide internet access. It wasn't until 89/90 that there email services could even talk to each other (via the internet).

Source: old enough to have listed compuserve "forums" and AOL "keywords" on my business cards...

Except fidonet nodes could talk to each other. I ran a node for only mail relay in Southern Ontario from 92-96(from the time I was in middle school to the time I was nearly finished high school), because a bunch of BBS's in the area were choking the only provider at the time for mail requests. By the time late '96 had come around most people had moved to ISP's and BBS's around here were dying. Oh BRE, FRE, and LORD how I do miss you at times.

I'm not saying it's irrelevant to the conversation. Not by any means. It holds a very important place in history. But it was it's own, separate thing. It wasn't the Internet, and it wasn't the commercial online services.

In a way, it was the first "common man's" global network. Sure, the Internet existed, and ARPAnet before that, but for many years they were only available to the privileged few.

Fido Net was a way for a regular guy to use his computer to communicate with p

As someone who moved away from BBS's to the Internet before there was such a thing as a "web site", I feel qualified to say that, No, AOL was not the first.

Back then there was no Firefox. We used gopher.There was no Google. We used archie.Even Mosaic wasn't around yet.There was no "click here to download". We used ftp from the command line. And there goddamn sure as fuck weren't any Viagra ads.

You could freely post your email address online for the whole world to see, with no worries of getting on a spa

I remember reading the Mac System 7 announcements on the Mac listserve (Appletalk?, something like that) about a year before it was released, and then downloading it from ftp.apple.com for free when it was released. In floppy disk image files. Reportedly ftp.apple.com was hosted by a Mac SE/30 running A/UX.

Although certainly not the first ISP, I think Delphi was one of the first commercial online services to offer internet access (maybe late 1992, definitely by 93). Delphi was totally text based, but if I recall, it only cost $20/month for 20 hours while AOL, though snazzier, was something like $3/hr. The one good thing about AOL discs in the very early 90s, was coming bundled with a version of GeoWorks that ran on DOS.

Anyway, I finally got actual internet through a dial-up ISP in late 1994, then DSL in 199

The best thing about AOL was that for several years, I never had to buy floppy disks. I could count on a reliable stream of free ones showing up in my mail box on a regular basis. Sometimes 2 or 3 in a day.

I was quite perturbed when they switched to sending their shit out on CD.....

UUNET was not providing internet connections at that time. They started out as a UUCP service provider, primarily providing email and Usenet feeds via uucp. So sometimes people will say they are the first ISP, just like people will claim Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were all ISP's back then. But The World was the first true ISP providing access to the Internet, which probably wasn't all that exciting for the general public at that point.

Are you talking about websites? Because I can't imagine people were all that excited about new telnet, ftp or gopher sites. If you're talking websites then your timeline is a little off. The World became the first ISP in 1989. Tim Berners-Lee created the first website in December 1990, but didn't really advertise the fact (and make a web browser available) until August of 1991.

I'm guessing it's because the BBS operator didn't sell that as a reliable service. You knew those machines were there. You knew you could route through the BBS to those machines. You had passwords for those machines.

If your BBS's sysop had known a teacher or something, gotten a password, and then re-sold that service... TROUBLE.

FWIW, I was a bit taken aback by TFA because I was under the impression that there was no commercial dial-up Internet until some kind of law was passed in the early 90s, and that

Anybody could connect to the uucp network, it was ad-hoc and came with unix all out of bell labs and written by private industry.

The TCP/IP network otoh, was paid for by USG research dollars which the USG thinks gives them statutory authority over it, hence the dns and ip regime in place now which is effectively government control, not the private industry control that exists over the network itself.

At the time the NSF regulated IP transit with the AUP; Steve Wolff, who Barry mentioned, was in charge of

Before I got a Sysop account at Compuserve, I paid $9.95 if memory serves.All the companies were there to download updates from, you could download libraries, utilities, examples, FAQs and Howtos, talk with the programmers, whine to the quality assurance people, you could buy books, jeans and coffee an some other stuff, play multiplayer games (all text) send email to the world, read usenet newsgroups, get email newsletters (tweets with no limit, for the young whippersnappers amongst you) and later also use

Before I got a Sysop account at Compuserve, I paid $9.95 if memory serves.
All the companies were there to download updates from, you could download libraries, utilities, examples, FAQs and Howtos, talk with the programmers, whine to the quality assurance people, you could buy books, jeans and coffee an some other stuff, play multiplayer games (all text) send email to the world, read usenet newsgroups, get email newsletters (tweets with no limit, for the young whippersnappers amongst you) and later also use the web.

Why would people pay the double for what exactly?

The ability to connect to an arbitrary Internet-based service with a client program that connects using TCP?

Perhaps what you describe was adequate for the vast majority of users, but somebody who wanted direct access to the Internet, including, for example, the ability to (perhaps slooooowly) FTP to an available Internet FTP site would welcome it.

"Perhaps what you describe was adequate for the vast majority of users, but somebody who wanted direct access to the Internet, including, for example, the ability to (perhaps slooooowly) FTP to an available Internet FTP site would welcome it."

I don't think he had Internet access in 1987. That came a bit later, I believe. Certainly not on the Microvax. Andy didn't charge for access to the machine when it was a BBS which probably saved his butt.

Lots of time spent in Vax Multi-User Moria and VMS Phone.

I believe Daver was 12 or something when he wrote the full-screen editor for the BBS.

Add $5.00/month for unlimited* dial-up.* Unlimited does not mean 24 by 7 connectivity. It means unmetered, interactive usage. Sessions inactive for more than 20 minutes are subject to disconnection. Attempts to defeat inactivity detection may result in additional charges or termination of service.

IF IT'S FUCKING LIMITED, DON'T FUCKING CALL IT UNLIMITED!

How hard is it to just say "Add $5.00/month for unmetered, interactive usage" without an asterisk and a bunch of bullshit between "Add $5" and the description of what you actually get for your five bucks?

I first went online with a brand-new, crazy-fast 14.4 that I had to set the DIP switches on in 1995. So I wasn't there in 1989, but I'm not a total noob, either. Busy signals 90% of the time? Not in 1995. You're exaggerating just a shade, perhaps. Maybe once every couple days I couldn't connect, but I usually got through on the second call, and pretty much always by the third. I didn't get cable until 2000 or so.

I have no problem with how he runs his business -- phone lines, idle time, etc., yeah, I get tha

Like you I have no qualms with the "unlimited" description. Back then, when you wanted to use any network service, you dialed in, probably on your only phone line, which before voicemail service (or as an expensive extra charge), meant people got a busy signal if trying to call you. When you were done online, you'd disconnect to free up the phone line for yourself as well as the ISP's modem for other users' use.

What was cool about an "unlimited" plan, of course, was that you didn't have to worry about rac

Ok, this guy in my post here is not Barry Shein. Posting anonymously just in case someone can figure out who it is...

Anyway I was a sysadmin on some Unix and VMS machines at one work site. At one point I hooked into Usenet via another department within the company, but was always a bit nervous about it as this was a large defense contractor that was paranoid about any outside network connections. I only wanted the technical newsgroups and some access to external email but I did allow a few choice non-tec

This fueled a lot of the early net. I knew an deign engineer that wanted the engineering groups. They wouldn't spring for a uunet feed from DC to Irvine so buddy got smart and gve his boss a floppy of porn from home. He said you get one of these every week if I get a full feed, Capish? He got a full feed and friday afternoons had to download and pay the porn tax. You did what you to, that connection in Irvine was at the time strategically important to the growt

With all three of them routing packets between a host on the other end of a dialup SLIP connection (not PPP, the first RFCs for that came out in 1989 [ietf.org]) and the Internet? If not, they weren't ISPs, they were providers of other dialup services.

Why? The IP network was tiny back then and the uucp network was enormous ans had all the apps. There were no people passing packet back then because nobody wanted to - they didn't need to. You could get everything the network had to offer via uucp.

Except telnet. But there was nowhere to telnet to. Back then if you needed to telnet you had a line in your house. What else would your boss say "ok, we need you to telnet it. I hear a third ISP opened in the US, so use that."

Why? The IP network was tiny back then and the uucp network was enormous ans had all the apps. There were no people passing packet back then because nobody wanted to - they didn't need to. You could get everything the network had to offer via uucp.

OK, so there wasn't much of a market for ISPs back then, and most organizations offering dialup services weren't ISPs, they provided UUCP access or UNIX shell access or a BBS or....

So, if neither agora nor PDxs nor Teleport offered your machine the ability to directly transmit IP packets to and receive IP packets from hosts on the Internet, they may have offered very useful services, but they weren't ISPs, and thus do not count as evidence that The World wasn't the first dialup ISP.

agora was. I know because I had it. I know because a friend and I convinced Alan Batie (the owner/operator) to install a SLIP daemon in 1987.

Many years later, I worked at Intel, and looked up Alan. I had to introduce myself to the man that, to me, "gave me the Internet." He remembered me. (Or my user name, anyway.) I was more flattered by that at the time than if a sports star or president had told me they remembered me.

I was dialing up to Freenets back in 1988, paying for 'privileged' access (though they were non-profit) and was using email, archie, gopher, IRC, etc... Wouldn't this be considered an ISP?

Only if you could send IP packets directly onto the Internet and receive IP packets directly from the Internet, which would seem to imply that they were Freenets in a sense other than this sense of Freenet [freenetproject.org] ("Freenet is a self-contained network, while Tor allows accessing the web anonymously, as well as using "hidden services" (anonymous web servers). Freenet is not a proxy: You cannot connect to services like Google or Facebook using Freenet." And, no, "Google and Facebook didn't exist at the time" is not

As I stated, I used Archie [wikipedia.org], Gopher [wikipedia.org] and IRC.. and as I just remembered EW-Too chat prgrams and MUDs/MUSHes/Etc... and was connecting to them directly from a shell account.... so by your definition that falls under ISP.

As I stated, I used Archie [wikipedia.org], Gopher [wikipedia.org] and IRC.. and as I just remembered EW-Too chat prgrams and MUDs/MUSHes/Etc... and was connecting to them directly from a shell account.... so by your definition that falls under ISP.

OK, I guess I didn't make it clear enough.

If you can send IP packets over your dialup connection and have them routed onto the Internet, and have IP packets from the Internet routed to your machine over the dialup connection, you're dialed into an ISP.

If you have to dial up a host and log in to getty over that dialup connection, then you're dialed up to a UNIX shell service provider, not an ISP, even if the UNIX host you've logged into happens to be connected to the Internet.

No.UUCP was the 'internet' until TCP/IP became more popular. The first personal computers used UUCP to connect to the internet.By internet, I mean the hardware and lines. TCP/IP is not the internet. It's an internet protocol. A way to tonnect to communicate vie 'the internet'.

No.
UUCP was the 'internet' until TCP/IP became more popular. The first personal computers used UUCP to connect to the internet.
By internet, I mean the hardware and lines. TCP/IP is not the internet. It's an internet protocol. A way to tonnect to communicate vie 'the internet'.

The Internet, with a capital "I", as in "Internet Service Provider", uses the Internet protocol suite (IP, UDP, TCP, etc.), not UUCP, although UUCP can run over TCP. I don't care what you mean by "internet", with a lower-case "i"; as we're talking about who was the first Internet-with-a-capital-I service provider, what you mean by "internet" is completely irrelevant.

Yes, I think the domain name "freenetproject.org" was chosen by the Freenet developers because they wanted a domain name containing "freenet".

(I.e., "freenetproject.org" appears to be the domain name for the Freenet [wikipedia.org] Project; it's not just a bunch of people who liked Freenet and decided to have a domain name with "freenet" in it.)

I remember their daily message (msgs) had "Hello, world -- dmr" for the longest time.
Also that Barry had very long discussions with NSFNet folks (Steven Wolffe?) about AUP, as the first commercial ISP.

I signed up for a World account in the first days of his operation, and still maintain my account there. It remains my main email account of last resort, even though I have two email domains now.
The interviewer and Barry perhaps didn't know about the dialup BBSing that went on before there was a commodity internet available. As a note, I dialed up to his system in Boston for about 2 or 3 bucks an hour, so it wasn't cheap, but it didn't break the bank either. (From Irvine, Ca.). Later a company here in

Yeah, not the first. There were multiple public ISPs in Portland in 1989. PDxs, agora, Teleport...

One is still around, nearly 30 years later - Raindrop Laboratories http://www.rdrop.com/ [rdrop.com] still has its "vintage" mid '90s web page, too. (It has been around since 1985.)

If you follow the "Alan Batie [batie.org]" link from RainDrop's home page, and then follow his "agora [batie.org]" link from "I work at Peak Internet, a local ISP in Corvallis, Oregon. I also run a small ISP in Portland, Oregon, called RainDrop Laboratories. It started in 1985 as a public access system called Agora, while I was working at Intel.", it speaks of agora's RainNet Internet access starting in 1990 - "Now that our subject had SVR4, with TCP/IP and all, and there being several other hacker sorts around town who'd been eye

I don't know who was first but I was on Wetware Diversions, a dial-up ISP in San Francisco connected to the Internet in as early as 1987 and it was up before then...

DNS wasn't even in use at the time

RFC 882 [ietf.org] and RFC 883 [ietf.org] were published as early as 1983, so I really doubt that DNS wasn't at use at all in 1987.

I recall as e-mail addresses still needed to use bangs ("!") for routing

That's a UUCP convention, not used on the real Internet. Perhaps the service that you used required bang paths and didn't use DNS, but DNS was most definitely in use by people connected to the Internet (as opposed to people connected to a dialup service that gatewayed email onto the Internet).

I did a quick search for "Wetware Diversions" and came up with this long list of ISPs going back as far as 1988:

If what you offer can interoperate with the network, you're an ISP. What do you think the ip network looked like before the web? Hint: nobody really used Gopher (other than.ca whois) and 99% of all activity was mail and news. Which came from uucp and was ported to IP. But until the web came along there was simply no reason for a pain in the ass SLIP or PPP connection cause you could do anything impo

If you can only route mail messages and Usenet mail postings to the Internet, with your clients using UUCP to send them and receive them, and perhaps provide the ability to download and upload files using UUCP and maybe other uux-based services, you're a UUCP service provider, not an ISP.

I had internet access at work starting in 1986 but since it was work related I stuck to fairly sensible net usage. My first home ISP was through a small startup in rural northern NJ, starting in 1992 or so The local phone service at that time under NJ Bell was pretty terrible. Local calls only serviced half the county, and not even the county seat where AOL and Compuserve's dial-up phone banks were established, so AOL use was a toll call. Recognizing this, two guys set up a dial-up phone bank in an area

Based on first-hand information, and belief, The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link - The WELL, a product of Whole Earth Access - was first to offer dialup Internet accounts to paying customers.

Dialup accounts where you'd run SLIP over the dialup line, and IP packets you sent over the line got routed to arbitrary Internet hosts, and those hosts could route packets back to your machine which would receive them over the SLIP line?

If not, that's not a dialup Internet account. It might be a dialup shell account, or a dialup UUCP account, but it's not a dialup shell account. Barry's not saying he was the first to offer dialup shell accounts or dialup UUCP accounts, he's saying he was the first to of